i have with me, ron brown, cnn contributor. ron, it's not how it works in washington, the straight up-or-down vote. >> it hasn't for a long time. there are two separate things here. there's the filibuster in the senate. but the biggest obstacles is the hastert rule in the house. it has always been hard to see bill that a majority of house republicans would vote for that would be acceptable to president obama. so in many ways, i felt for really months, the only two choices were going over the cliff or abandoning that hastert rule and john boehner being willing to bring up a bill that could be passed by democratic votes, not passed by the majority of republicans. sounded a little more optimistic on the relative gauge we have than over the last couple of weeks. >> they're now running out of venues to discuss this. they discussed it at the white house. tried to get a deal between speaker boehner and president obama. now it's gone to the senate. harry reid and mitch mcconnell will try to work something out. after that, they have run